Driving In a Fake Swedish Town

A look at how active safety tech is developed, wherein we mow down some dudes with our car.

I feel a little perverted driving into Carson Citybut its not because Im in Nevada, about to slink out to some brothel. No, Im in a silent and snow-crusted part of western Sweden, a place where apparently you can mow down pedestrians and get away with it.

Looping through the roundabout, I hit the main drag and punch the gas. Ka-thump. A guy slams over the hood and sticks to the windshield like a big insect, limbs and all. I jam the brakes and his body tumbles to the pavement, motionless. Now I feel guilty, too—or would, if I weren’t busy texting with both hands.

But there are no police or any consequences here. The “person” is a canvas dummy dangling on a string, the windows and storefronts nothing more than Hollywood-style dressing. There is an electrically powered Volkswagen Golf parked on a side street, but it’s actually a giant balloon and rides on a plastic rail. Only my car, the road signs, a few flowers, and the humans in a heated control booth at the intersection are the real deal.

Carson City—located in the real town of Vårgårda, an hour from Volvo headquarters in Gothenburg—is the world’s only purpose-built simulated city for testing active safety systems. It's run by Autoliv, a Swedish supplier that researches and manufactures safety components for nearly every car brand in the world. (Autoliv’s major clients are BMW, Mercedes, and Audi; Volvo develops most of its own systems.) Instead of choosing a Swedish name for the “town,” the company was inspired by Nevada's state capital, particularly that city's near-abandonment after the gold rush. (Plus, Carson City sounds a bit like the name of Autoliv’s CEO, Jan Carlson.) Indeed, entering the 0.7-mile-long strip is like stepping onto the set of an old Western film; it's a one-block ghost town.

I’m the first American journalist to visit Carson City since it opened in 2009, and I treat the experience a bit like a scene from Grand Theft Auto, running down the dummy again and again. But Autoliv’s drivers don’t show up to play in Carson City. My car is one of the company’s test fleet, a circuitry-filled Saab 9-5 rigged with prototype cameras and GPS that allow the booth to control the throttle and perfectly time collisions with the remote-controlled dummy and the faux Golf. Sometimes, the dummy hangs out in the street. Other times, it meanders across without looking. The Golf may shoot into the intersection at random, or a second Saab may dodge an obstacle, leaving the tailgating fool behind with no time to react.

Autoliv repeats these kinds of scenarios over and over in its Carson City simulations—about 1000 times a year. Did the auto-braking system react in time, or at all? When did the car’s sensors recognize a person? Did it think the guy was a signpost? Does the technology being tested work at night, in snow, in rain? This controlled environment is the only safe place to find out.

After chuckling with the test drivers over multiple accidents and near-misses, I walk around Carson City with a lump in my throat. I think about my 15-year-old cousin, hit by a car on a dark street five years ago. Could these technologies have saved him?

Salah Hadi, Autoliv’s director of vision systems, thinks about this sort of thing every day. “The problem is in the prediction,” he says. “There is a trade-off between how many false positives you allow versus true positives.”

Of nearly 34,000 U.S. fatalities involving cars and motorcycles in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 4700 of them were pedestrians and bicyclists. That’s down from a peak in 2005, when more than 43,000 people died, and based on data from its first nine months, 2011 is on track to be even lower (although total vehicle miles traveled decreased last year, too). It’s hardly great news: We’re talking about more deaths on U.S. roads in three months than American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan in 10 years.

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*AccuPayment estimates payments under various scenarios for budgeting and informational purposes only. AccuPayment does not state credit or lease terms that are available from a creditor or lessor, and AccuPayment is not an offer or promotion of a credit or lease transaction.